Malema lost, but so did we

Prior to the EFF’s selfdescribed “national shutdown”, the party dominated the media space. The intersection between Julius Malema’s threatening language, the paranoia resulting from the July 2021 riots and the authoritarianism of the state gave him and his party massive attention in the press and on social media channels.

Malema is a master at media manipulation, and the leadup to the “national shutdown” generated huge attention for a small party. But when the day of reckoning came, the EFF suffered complete humiliation.

For its shutdown to be successful, the EFF would have needed to mobilise tens of thousands of people in the major cities. Instead, there were only small protests, pathetically small ones. Even at the main event – the march in Pretoria led by Malema – there were, according to media reports, fewer than 1,000 people.

The gap between Malema’s hubris – he was even speaking of a revolution in the days before the protests – and reality was vast. He now stands exposed as a politician who is very good at winning media attention, mediocre at winning votes and completely inept at organising support on the ground.

But the damage done to Malema and his party was not only owing to their failure to mobilise on any sort of scale. The image of Malema and Carl Niehaus walking hand in hand in the Pretoria march would have been sickening to most South Africans.

Malema, who once said he was willing to kill for Jacob Zuma, then turned on him when it was expedient to do so, is now openly allied with the selfdescribed Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ANC.

Niehaus is one of the most nauseating figures in South African politics and Malema’s reputation, already battered by the EFF’s own corruption scandals, will now be in tatters. He has done himself serious damage, quite probably permanent, by associating with the likes of Niehaus.

Malema will remain a player in our politics because the media always amplify his relevance, and because the decline in support for the ANC will mean that small parties can negotiate real power for themselves in coalition arrangements – and he is a canny operator. But we now know that Malema has no right to claim he speaks for anything other than a small minority of South Africans, and that he has no capacity to mobilise on the streets at any meaningful scale.

But the failed national protest should also leave us very concerned. For a start, the state’s highly militarised response was very disturbing. After Marikana we cannot be sanguine about the sort of language used by Bheki Cele and others in the days prior to 20 March, and no democracy can accept that the army should be used to police protest.

The paranoia that was running out of control ahead of the “shutdown” was not only a middleclass phenomenon. Many migrant communities were deeply worried, which is understandable. The EFF flip-flops on the question of xenophobia, but it has taken highly xenophobic positions at times, and its allies in the ANC’s RET faction viciously attacked migrants just before the July riots.

But the way in which some middleclass groups armed themselves and prepared for war was also deeply disturbing. It shows an alarming decline in faith in the state and raises the real risk of vigilante violence. There is a sense that South Africa is splitting off into antagonistic groups, some armed. This does not bode well for our future.

The failed “shutdown” was also a day of disgrace for some factions in the South African left. Though the larger massbased organisations of the working class and the poor refused to support the EFF’s day of protest, some of the tiny but vociferous sectarian organisations on the outer fringes of the left offered their support to the EFF’s action.

For the left to support a march led by Malema and Niehaus is a staggering error in political judgement. Nobody in their right mind considers the EFF or the likes of Niehaus to be on the left. Their politics is the authoritarian populism of a kleptocratic political class.

In a way, it is almost surprising that, despite the massive media coverage leading up to the EFF day of action, it attracted such desultory support. South Africa is in such a deep economic and political crisis, made concrete to us all by mass unemployment, blackouts and Cyril Ramaphosa’s utter failure to lead, that it seems logical to assume that almost any sort of spark could ignite mass protest or even mass riots. An unanticipated event could still set off another round of rioting, or a charismatic populist could emerge who could do what Malema has failed to achieve and put the spark to the tinder.

We urgently need a new political party that can inspire us around a vision for a better country, and we urgently need the sort of political force that can organise millions of people around a progressive vision for a country. We need to recover a mass democratic politics.